


Missing me, missing you

by anonymousAlchemist



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, just an umbrella trying her best, spoilers for the latest lunar interlude
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-26
Updated: 2017-03-29
Packaged: 2018-10-10 21:35:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10448067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anonymousAlchemist/pseuds/anonymousAlchemist
Summary: Listen, it’s really hard to protect your brother when he insists on being a disaster, and also when you’re trapped in an umbrella and kind of sort of dead.(Or: Lup does what she can. She’s been watching this whole time.)





	1. Me and you

**Author's Note:**

> obvious spoilers for the latest arc.  
> gotta get that sweet sweet lup pov fic.
> 
> gonna be honest im mostly just expanding on headcanons because the personality diffs pre/post amnesia really interest me.

It’s exceedingly inconvenient, being trapped in an umbrella. Doubly so when that umbrella is a powerful magic staff. First of all: you’re basically a ghost, and incorporeal to the rest of the world, only able to move the umbrella through strength of will. Second, you’re being held by the skeleton of your flesh-body in a cave, which, while humorously morbid, is a little bit out of the way and there’s not much to do except heckle the extremely rare traveler. And they can’t even hear you yelling that their pants look stupid, and their hair looks weird, and their face is funny.

On the bright side, you managed to hide the Phoenix-fire Gauntlet that you made, you’ve got all your memories back, and your shriveled husk looks cool as all hell in your red robe and bones, freaking people out left and right. You have to dwell on the positives when you’re partially responsible for the hypothetically upcoming apocalypse.

Another downside: When your beloved idiot twin brother comes barreling with your friends, there’s no way to say, “Hey Taako, maybe pick me up oh no no Merle don’t grab me I love you but nope sorry this wand is Tex-Mex-Twins only Merle will you stop!” other than flinging Merle away. You don’t feel bad about that, actually.

Another upside: You’re easily portable, so when your brother does grab the handle of the Umbra Staff, you let him, and he takes you with him. He doesn’t know it’s you, but that’s cool, you remember that he doesn’t remember that you were Red Robes, so of course he wouldn’t recognize the sick skeleton as yours. That’s fine. Of course he remembers you, though, he has to remember Taako-and-Lup, even if he doesn’t remember the organization.

“Ch’yeah!” You say, even though Taako can’t hear you. “Tex-mex-twins forever!” It’s possible you’re overexcited from the sight of your brother and two of your best friends and teammates. It’s been a long time since you’ve been stuck here. You float a bit of your essence over to hover in front of Taako’s face.

“Wow,” you say. “You look rough, bro.”

Nobody else would be able to tell. But Taako’s face is your face, as familiar to you as the back of your hand. You can see the tension in the set of his jaw, the beginning of fine lines on his forehead. He looks like he spent a long time being unhappy. Merle and Magnus also look, well, not sadder, but more absent, more distracted than you’ve seen them before.

“Had a rough couple of decades, huh?” you say, and rest an ethereal hand on Taako’s shoulder. “It’s cool. I’ve got your guyses backs, now.”

He carries you out of the caves with him, and you gleefully let yourself be taken. Things are looking up!

Of course, then Fandolin happens.

“Fuck,” you say. “Barry’s going to need a new body, isn’t he.”

_____

It takes you a while to notice that your brother is different. He’s...mean, for a lack of a better word. His goofs are still funny, but they go on for too long, they push and prod at the cracks in people’s psyches in a way that seems almost unfair, because he’s smarter and crueler than most people when he wants to be.

The two of you were never really lawful, by any standards of the word, but you did have some semblance of morals. You know, don’t steal from kids, try not to drive people to complete ego-death, and things like that. The thing about your brother, the thing about you, is that you’re prickly. You’re not nice. But you are kind. Or, you are. He was.

You had friends, is the thing. Great friends, the type you cared about and who cared about you. Taako was the one who made everyone eat dinner together, even if he said it was because he didn’t trust the team to be adults and adequately feed themselves. It was him and Magnus who made monthly fantasy video game nights a thing, and when the seven of you voted on whether to make the relics, he claimed that it would be fine, that he trusted the six of you with your life. You had agreed with him.

But here, Taako holds himself separate.

“Wow, not having me around is really doing a number on your psyche, isn’t it, baby bro?” you say, the third time you watch him sit up straight, jolted awake by a nightmare in the middle of his trance. He scrubs his eyes and lies back down.

“Well,” you say, and rub your eyes in the palm of your hand. “I guess I’m going crazy too, so that makes two of us.”

He closes his eyes. You watch him fall back asleep, and curl up next to him in the space he leaves on the bed. You fit in it perfectly, but can’t feel anything.

“I miss talking with you,” you say into his ear. He doesn’t hear you, and doesn’t respond. You sigh. “Yeah. Exactly.”

Lying next to Taako reminds you of being a kid. It brings back memories of being too poor to have more than one bed, then choosing to sleep in one bed because it was weird not to have somebody else around all the time, and of course you grew out of it, but when one of you had night terrors you would slip into the other’s bunk and it was totally fine, there was the comforting warmth of knowing there was somebody beside you who you could count on.

“Goodnight, Taako.”

You close your eyes, and pretend to sleep.  
____

But months pass, and Taako doesn’t talk about you. He doesn’t even mention you. And you begin to wonder whether Taako remembers you at all.

How could he not, though? It makes sense that he wouldn’t remember the rest of your team, you only met the other five on the ship. But you? Your life is the mirror image of Taako’s life, you grew up arm in arm, the only reason the two of you survived to adulthood. You know everything about each other.

But now there are secrets that you don’t know about your brother. Who’s Sazed? When did Taako have a cooking show? You hate that there are parts of his life that you know nothing about, that he doesn’t talk about so you can’t learn about, the stuff that you suspect is what started making him act like a off-brand version of your Taako.

It comes to a head during the kid’s magic lessons, when Taako finally says something about the bits of his past that you’re oblivious about. It makes you angry. It makes you sad. Why would he say that he was always on his own?

“For fuck’s sake, Taako, I’m not some kind of secret!” you yell at him.

And you obliterate the macarons to get his attention. He hates wasting food.

Then you blast your name into the wall. LUP, like everyone called you, short for Chalupa, quick and easy off the tongue, short and sweet just like you.

“What’s Lup?” Angus says.

“I don’t know,” Taako says, bewildered, and your nonexistent heart spasms painfully in your nonexistent chest.

Oh. So it’s like that, then. 


	2. You and Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> heck ye its done, had to get it out before griffin destroys my headcanons, even as i long for that day. Enjoy some sweet sweet Lup content.

  
After that, you drift for a bit. Taako still carries you around everywhere, but you don’t feel like talking to him. You wander as far as you can – which is like, a foot and a half from the umbrella, and watch what everyone else is doing. There’s Magnus, carving a spoon to replace the one he broke, or sneaking out at night to go talk to the voidfish when he can’t sleep. There’s Merle, talking to his plants as he waters them.

They don’t change much. It’s kind of nice.

And you watch their new friends too. There’s the kid, Ango, whose macarons you crisped, getting magic lessons every tuesday and thursday in the cafeteria, grinning bright when he finally casts a full mage hand. There’s the sadsack bard who plays music in the elevator and sometimes gives the boys recordings of his music. There’s the super-cute couple who Magnus spars with and who taunt Taako into fighting. There’s so many people on the moonbase. And there’s Lucretia, and Captain Davenport, who never speaks anything but his name anymore. You don’t watch them.

Weeks pass like this. You don’t talk at Taako, you spend a lot of time missing Barry, you let your ethereal form de-coalesce a little bit. You exist less as a conscious self-aware entity and more as a loose collection of thought and energy.

You’re not depressed, nah. Not you. Not Lup. Kind of bummed, maybe a little bit. You’re angry at Lucretia, mostly. What did she do? Why did she erase you, so completely wholecloth?

But there’s not that much time for thinking once you get to Refuge, and that reminds you that it doesn’t matter how you feel right now. All you have to do is try and protect your brother and your friends.

______

Sometimes you wish it was Taako in the umbrella, instead of you. He’d be taking this whole “incorporeal, trapped in a umbrella, giving snappy commentary that nobody can hear” thing way better than you are. But whenever you have that thought, you feel like shit.

Still, you’re going bugfuck insane, not being able to do anything. Between you and your twin brother, you were always the one who blasted forward with your umbrella swinging, the one who specialized in battle magic. He hung back, made plans, and cast clever transmutations, and the both of you were perfectly happy with that division of skills.

You were made for action, not stasis, and now you’re in your fucking umbrella, and you can’t do anything.   
______

Deciding to attack Kravitz makes you feel better, actually. What the hell was Taako thinking, hooking up with an emissary of the Raven Queen? That’s objectively a terrible decision, but he always had the worst taste in men. You line yourself up to fire.

And well, Taako is just going to have to get a new boyfriend, but he’s just as pretty as you so that’s not hard for him. Just as fire starts to light the tip of your umbrella, Taako flings you skyward and you shoot off a burst of flame. He stares at the umbrella in shock. You roll your eyes.

“Well all right,” you say. “If you want to keep him that badly, kemosabe, I guess you can have him.”

Then Kravitz mentions that he thinks there’s a lich, and you freeze. Oh, that’s not good, if he can tell that you’re here, that’s bad news for you and your soul and you might just get for-real disappeared. You shrink yourself around the umbrella, and glare at Taako as he suggests that maybe it’s the lich. Just because you’ve been trying to do stuff doesn’t mean that he needs to rat you out to Death, I mean, how fucked would he be without you? You sigh with relief when Kravitz dismisses Taako’s ideas, and make a face when he kisses Taako goodnight. Gross, so gross.

At least he’s happy, you guess. Taako practically floats back to the dorm.

______

You vibrate with delight when Taako buys the Band of Projected Thought at Fantasy Costco. Finally! At least he’ll know that you’re there, even if he doesn’t remember you. And if anyone else puts it on, then you can talk to them too.

Too bad he puts the band away as soon as he buys it. “Aw, c’mon, dude,” you say.”

He continues to not put it on, even when you’re back in the common area, where the guys sometimes test out their new equipment. Maybe he’s forgotten about it. You badger him about it, not that he can hear you.

“Put the band on, Taako,” you say. “C’mon dude, you bought it, are you just refusing to put it on out of spite, do you not want to talk to your favorite twin sister who you don’t remember, are you trying to make me die of fucking loneliness, oh wait, I’m already dead.”

He doesn’t put the band on. He just sits on the couch, and you sigh.

“I’m sorry my guy,” you say. “I know it’s not your fault.” He's left just enough space on the couch so that you can squeeze in between him and the armrest. You lean on his shoulder, even though you don’t feel anything, and he doesn’t either.

He turns on the TV and flips channels until he gets to fantasy food network, which is playing a marathon of fantasy Chopped. It’s his favorite show.

You watch television together into the wee hours of the morning, until he falls asleep.

_____

Wonderland is the absolute worst! If Barry wasn't with them, you'd be throwing a total shitfit. You’d be throwing fireballs everywhere and dragging Taako out of the tent by your handle even though that’s not something you can physically do. But you trust Barry, even though he’s being an absolute creep about this whole thing. And with him watching over the three of them, you know he won’t let things get too bad.

It’s fucking amazing to see Barry again, even if he doesn’t know you’re there.

But things get grim and grimmer. Wonderland is constructed to wear down even the hardiest souls. When Taako gets crushed by the machinery you scream, but it happens too quickly for you to even try doing anything. What the hell is Barry doing, letting your friends sacrifice anatomy and memories and luck?

It’s sort of shallow, but the thing that bothers you most about the spin-the-wheel “rewards” is that Taako looks different, now. You could care less about his good looks, but looking at him had always been like looking at a mirror. And now his face is no longer your face. You’re glad that he slaps a glamour on immediately.

Finally, the boys get sick of playing along, and it is absolutely wonderful, even with Taako going comatose for a moment.

You tear the lich’s magic apart, and it’s like rending flesh from bone and it is so, so satisfying. Fuck that asshole for fucking with your friends. Lydia’s screams: music to your ears.

You’re not really a nice person, actually.

______

Taako finally uses the Band of Projected Thought. Of course it’s so that he can talk to Magnus, and while you’re sad that Magnus ended up in a mannequin, now that he’s got a backup body you’re honestly sort of glad that this happened, if it leads to you being able to talk to people for real.

It’s different, though, then when you talk at him without an interface. While you feel coherent, It’s like pushing through static to get anything more than unfiltered emotion broadcast on the frequency that the band is working on. Maybe it’s not optimized for haunted umbrellas. You summon all your emotions and memories about Barry, all the warm nights and laughter and hands held in hands. “Trust Barry!” you project, “Love Barry!”   
_____

And then all seven of you are all in the room together again. The last time you were all in a room together you were deciding what to do with the relics, and everyone was in red, and really, it was just as much of a disaster as now. But everyone had their memories, and you had a body, so you consider this a step down from the last time, really.

At least everyone else is in a body, so they’ve got that going for them.

“I’m so sorry, Taako, Barry. There was nothing I could do,” Lucretia says. And you realize that this is the first time they're hearing about your death. Oh.

There’s tears welling at the corner of Taako’s eyes. He doesn’t seem to notice. His hand is white-knuckled around your umbrella. Lucretia’s jaw is set, remembering what happened to you, what you do not like to think about. Barry’s shoulders are tight, and you wish you could reach out and knead the tension out of them.

But you can’t. You aren’t anything more than the spirit tethered to a magical artifact, and you have no effect on the corporeal world.

But you’re not dead. You’re not. You place an incorporeal hand on Taako’s hand, the only one of your friends that you can reach.

“Hey,” you say to Taako. “Hey,” you say to Barry, to Merle and Magnus, to Captain Davenport and Lucretia. “I’m still here.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> annnnd that's a wrap! 
> 
> it's sort of sad, but like, god damn is her situation sort of sad. 
> 
> come talk to me about lup at anonymousalchemist.tumblr.com im not even kidding i have so many thoughts about her that i haven't vocalized.

**Author's Note:**

> its so /weird/ writing a character who doesn't have an established voice. lup, mah gurl, trying to look after her objectively worse brother. she was the competent woman thb had with them the entire time. 
> 
> follow me at anonymousalchemist.tumblr.com or anonymousalchemistart.tumblr.com for more of this, whatever this is.
> 
> and leave a kudos or comment if thats a thing you wanna do, that'd be cool! you'll make my day, my dude.


End file.
